Did Cambridge Analytica get your data? You’ll know soon

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Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said her company has received legal assurances that Cambridge Analytica has deleted the improperly obtained information it gathered from Facebook users.

NEW YORK (AP) — Anyone who’s been wondering if their private Facebook data might have been swept up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal will soon get their first clues.

Starting Monday, all 2.2 billion Facebook users will receive a notice on their feeds, titled “Protecting Your Information,” with a link to see what apps they use and what information they have shared with those apps. If they want, they can shut off apps individually or turn off third-party access to their apps completely.

In addition, the 87 million users who might have had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica will get a more detailed message informing them of this. Facebook says most of the affected users (more than 70 million) are in the U.S., though there are over a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and the U.K.

Reeling from its worst privacy crisis in history — allegations that this Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections — Facebook is in full damage-control mode, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging he’s made a “huge mistake” in failing to take a broad enough view of what Facebook’s responsibility is in the world. He’s set to testify before Congress next week.

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie previously estimated that more than 50 million people were compromised by a personality quiz that collected data from users and their friends.

That Facebook app, called “This is Your Digital Life,” was a personality quiz created in 2014 by an academic researcher named Aleksander Kogan, who paid about 270,000 people to take it. The app vacuumed up not just the data of the people who took it, but also — thanks to Facebook’s loose restrictions — data from their friends, too, including details that they hadn’t intended to share publicly.

Facebook later limited the data apps can access, but it was too late in this case.

Zuckerberg said Facebook came up with the 87 million figure by calculating the maximum number of friends that users could have had while Kogan’s app was collecting data. The company doesn’t have logs going back that far, he said, so it can’t know exactly how many people may have been affected.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement Wednesday that it had data for only 30 million people.

Facebook’s No. 2 executive says the company should have conducted an audit after learning that a political consultancy improperly accessed user data nearly three years ago.

Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told NBC’s “Today” show that at the time, Facebook received legal assurances that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the improperly obtained information.

“What we didn’t do is the next step of an audit and we’re trying to that now,” she said.

The audit of Cambridge Analytica is on hold, in deference to a U.K. investigation. But Facebook has been conducting a broader review of its own practices and how other third-party apps use data.

In addition, Facebook announced on Friday that it will require advertisers who want to run not just political ads, but also or so called “issue ads” —which may not endorse specific candidates or parties but discuss political topics— to be verified.